A few years before, I had had a vivid dream of watching from a height as a corpse’s foot broke through from beneath a frozen pond, and it seemed destined for a horror story. I chose a cross-country skiing setting because it seemed to work against the grain of horror, so maybe the material would not be too shopworn. I tried to write a story that would please both Stephen King and myself. Writing the story took the full six weeks allotted and gave me nightmares, but I finished it by the deadline and sent it off.
A few weeks later, I got a letter from the Boston Phoenix thanking me for entering and telling me I had finished in the top 1000. I envision them buried in thousands of really bad horror stories. Stephen King, of course, read a few that were filtered from the ocean of entries and chose a winner. This was pretty much what I had expected, and I wasn’t particularly crushed. Hey, now I had written three stories, and in only, what, six years? The pace left me breathless.
Jessica Amanda Salmonson bought the story for her anthology Tales By Moonlight, and, bless her heart, she persuaded Stephen King to write the introduction. King wrote a generous-spirited essay — most of the contributors were new writers — and it was enormously heartening to me to find out that, not only had Stephen King finally read the story that I had written specifically to please him, but that he actually liked it. Thank you, Stephen.
Nota bene: My partner, the very same John D. Berry who designed the volume you hold in your hand, also wrote a story for the Boston Phoenix contest. He finished in the top 500, and won a paperpack Stephen King book. Jessica took his story as well.
Nirvana High
Eileen Gunn & Leslie What
Sunday morning. Barbara awoke from a Technicolor dream in which she was holding hands with the sexiest person in the universe (though the person’s head was blank and fuzzy, and she was afraid it might be a girl instead of a boy) and dove straight into a vision predicting her chemistry teacher’s death. Barbara watched the accident unfold as it would happen that night: Mrs. Rathbone, dressed in her scarlet microfiber inflatable-bra-and-bustle outfit with spangles and silver fringe, was going to teleport from the Microsoft Park marina to Microsoft Stadium on the other side of the lake. It would be a fundraiser for the basketball team at Cobain High, which meant that nobody Barbara knew would attend. Special-ed students didn’t do team sports.
The textile-arts class had added the fringe and spangles on Friday to get extra credit. Everyone was nervous, especially Mrs. R. She had never tried to teleport so far in public before.
Barbara never knew the why of things that she foresaw, so she wasn’t sure if it was the distance or maybe some kind of interference from the spangles and fringe that would cause Mrs. Rathbone to rematerialize surrounded by a hundred cubic meters of frigid lake water, flooding the stadium.
Not that it mattered: she couldn’t change the outcome anyway. She lay in bed, in the room she shared with her younger sister, holding the dread inside and ignoring the details of what she had just seen. Mrs. R was the only person she liked in the entire school.
Eventually her alarm clock went off, its tiny voice soft and insinuating: “B.J., this is the beginning of a wonderful new day! It’s truly lovely weather outside, and today’s Sunday, a great day to develop the extrovert in your personality!” It sounded like her mother, and its voice got louder and more insistently cheery if she ignored it. “Barbara! If you get up right now, you can — ” She whacked it with the heel of her hand and it shut up. Her sister was already downstairs watching cartoons. She had begun before dawn and would continue until bedtime, pausing only for commercials. Sometimes the whole cartoon was a commercial.
Barbara washed her face and carefully shaved designs in her scalp with a tiny electric razor. She hoped it looked okay: she couldn’t really see what she was doing in the back. She put more glue on the dreads, just in case. Then she got dressed and went down to the kitchen for breakfast.
“Well, good morning, B.J.,” said her mother. “You’re up early for Sunday. That new alarm clock must be working, hey?” Her mother looked at her hair, started to say something, then reconsidered. Instead, she grabbed Barbara’s wrists, turned them over, and inspected them in the sunlight. “You can hardly see the scars now.” She nodded in satisfaction. “I’m so glad we went ahead with the plastic surgery. Your father was wrong — it’s certainly worth the extra money.”
“Waste of dough, Mom,” said Barbara. “Scars rule.”
Her mother let go of her. “This bacon your father got for breakfast — I worry about the sodium content. On the Today Show they were talking about sodium and nitrous in packaged meats. It causes cancer.”
“Nitrates, Mom. Nitrous is what you inhale.” But her mother was already off on another subject, spouting some completely incomprehensible psychobabble she’d heard on TV that morning. “Mom, was I adopted?” Her mother didn’t answer.
Throughout the day, Barbara did her best to keep her mind off her premonition, so her parents wouldn’t notice anything unusual. They were worried enough about her self-esteem, without her troubling them with something real. Mostly she stayed in her room, listening to Airhead real loud on the phones and trying to figure out the words.
At dinner, she picked at her food: soggy ramen noodles with overcooked peapods and undercooked carrots. For dessert, a kiwi-fruit-flavored Jello with embedded banana slices. The jello had achieved a colloidal state, and the banana slices hung suspended in light-green goo. It reminded her of chemistry class. She pushed it away and excused herself from the table.
“You didn’t take very much to eat,” said her mother. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”
Barbara groaned and pulled on her jacket. “I’m going to the basketball fundraiser,” she said. She didn’t really want to go, but she had to be there. She had to see what happened.
“Dressed like that?” asked her father. “What the hell did you do to your hair?”
“That’s nice,” said her mother quickly. “You make some friends who like basketball. That’s a good idea.”
She figured she’d go to the marina, where Mrs. R was starting from. The crowds would be at the stadium, waiting for her to reappear.
Barbara knew there was nothing she could do. When she was a kid, when she first started premoting, she tried to change things. She told her father not to eat at the JellyBelly Deli, but her remark whetted his appetite for knishes; he got salmonella. She told her sister not to get up on the high slide, but Tina didn’t like being ordered around; she broke her arm. The incident with her mother’s car was especially unfortunate.
Barbara caught on, and now kept her mouth shut — it didn’t make any difference in the results, but at least she didn’t get blamed for it. She had never premoted anything this serious before, but she knew what she had to do: stay out of the way of the inevitable.
At the marina, a platform had been set up overlooking Lake Washington, with a field of folding chairs in front of it. Most of the chairs were empty, except way up near the stage. Barbara sat on the side in the back and tried to look invisible.
Klieg lights were waving through the sky, and cameras from the school TV station were trained on Mrs. R’s presumed trajectory, although no one had ever been observed in the act of teleportation. Huge screens from the Microsoft — Sony Educational Channel had been set up to make the experience of being there as real as watching it on TV. The Cobain Marching Band was on the platform playing the school song, “Live Through This.” The drum majors, dressed as Courtney Love, screamed out the lyrics. The norms really made a big deal of all this fascist school-spirit stuff. Barbara wondered how they faked it.